Mathematics Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

Mathematics is commonly defined as the study of patterns of structure, change, and space; more informally, one might say it is the study of "figures and numbers". In the formalist view, it is the investigation of axiomatically defined abstract structures using symbolic logic and mathematical notation; other views are described in Philosophy of mathematics. Mathematics might be seen as a simple extension of spoken and written languages, with an extremely precisely defined vocabulary and grammar, for the purpose of describing and exploring physical and conceptual relationships.

Although mathematics itself is not usually considered a natural science, the specific structures that are investigated by mathematicians often have their origin in the natural sciences, most commonly in physics. However, mathematicians also define and investigate structures for reasons purely internal to mathematics, because the structures may provide, for instance, a unifying generalization for several subfields, or a helpful tool for common calculations. Finally, many mathematicians study the areas they do for purely aesthetic reasons, viewing mathematics as an art form rather than as a practical or applied science. Einstein referred to the subject as the Queen of the Sciences in his book Ideas and Opinions. Mathematics is considered absolute, without any reference.

The major disciplines within mathematics arose out of the need to do calculations in commerce, to measure land and to predict astronomical events. These three needs can be roughly related to the broad subdivision of mathematics into the study of structure, space and change.

Understanding and describing change in measurable quantities is the common theme of the natural sciences, and calculus was developed as a most useful tool for doing just that. The central concept used to describe a changing variable is that of a function. Many problems lead quite naturally to relations between a quantity and its rate of change, and the methods to solve these are studied in the field of differential equations. The numbers used to represent continuous quantities are the real numbers, and the detailed study of their properties and the properties of real-valued functions is known as real analysis. For several reasons, it is convenient to generalise to the complex numbers which are studied in complex analysis. Functional analysis focuses attention on (typically infinite-dimensional) spaces of functions, laying the groundwork for quantum mechanics among many other things. Many phenomena in nature can be described by dynamical systems and chaos theory deals with the fact that many of these systems exhibit unpredictable yet deterministic behavior.

An important field in applied mathematics is statistics, which uses probability theory as a tool and allows the description, analysis and prediction of phenomena and is used in all sciences. Numerical analysis investigates the methods of efficiently solving various mathematical problems numerically on computers and takes rounding errors into account.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Elucidating the symmetry between the creative and logical aspects of mathematics, W.S. Anglin observed, in Mathematics and History:

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.

Mathematics is not numerology. Although numerology uses modular arithmetic to boil names and dates down to single digit numbers, numerology arbitrarily assigns emotions or traits to numbers without bothering to prove the assignments in a logical manner. Mathematics is concerned with proving or disproving ideas in a logical manner, but numerology is not. The interactions between the arbitrarily assigned emotions of the numbers are intuitively estimated rather than calculated in a thoroughgoing manner.

Mathematics is not accountancy. Although arithmetic computation is crucial to the work of accountants, they are mainly concerned with proving that the computations are true and correct through a system of doublechecks. The proving or disproving of hypotheses is very important to mathematicians, but not so much to accountants. Advances in abstract mathematics are irrelevant to accountancy if the discoveries can't be applied to improving the efficiency of concrete bookkeeping.

Mathematics is not physics, despite the number of historical and philosophical relations between the two.

Hazewinkel, Michiel (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Mathematics. Kluwer Academic Publishers 2000. A translated and expanded version of a Soviet math encyclopedia, in ten (expensive) volumes, the most complete and authoritative work available. Also in paperback and on CD-ROM.